17.8.11

Sean Ryan, Facebook's director of games partnerships, is bringing some big changes to the social network's games service, including individual game recommendations a la Netflix, improving relationships with developers and focusing on quality of games instead of quantity. Game growth has slowed since Facebook got rid of game-notification spamming last year, Ryan said, stagnating at 200 million users, but it remains a focus for the company.

Facebook's announcement of coming innovation coincides suspiciously with Google Plus' rollout of its own games service, which is only taking 5 percent commission on its games (compared to Facebook's 30 percent) and has a separate tab for games updates, meaning no wall spam. It should be interesting to see which aspects of each other's services Facebook and Google Plus steal. What won't be interesting is how similar their games sections will be in the end.